Some observations on Lauren Boebert’s performance last week in Denver from The Nation via Balloon Juice:
… Boebert’s performance was noteworthy not just for her personal boorishness but also as part of a larger pattern of right-wingers vandalizing musicals. Strange as it may sound, one of the cultural symptoms of the Trump era is the hard right’s affinity for musicals—an art form they also repeatedly desecrate.
Donald Trump himself is a prime example. No president has had such an intense love for musicals. In the White House, music was key to calming down Trump during his frequent outburst of anger. As The New York Times reported in 2021, White House official Max Miller—nicknamed the “Music Man”—was tasked with playing show tunes like “Memory” from Cats to “pull [Trump] from the brink of rage.” This is truly a case of music having charms to sooth the savage breast…
The extreme right is rich in figures who can be described as failed theater kids. These are people whose sensibilities are clearly shaped by a love for the expressive power and excess emotions of musical theater. But they haven’t been able to make a name for themselves in the area of their true passion, so instead they bring their thwarted theater-kid energy to partisan agitation.
Trump’s on-again-off-again crony Steve Bannon is a quintessential failed theater kid, writing a long string of movie scripts that went nowhere. In the 1990s, with cowriter Julia Jones, he worked on a hip-hop musical titled The Thing I Am. A bizarre hybrid, this musical tried to mash together the plot of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus with the story of the 1992 Rodney King riots in Los Angeles…
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James O’Keefe, founder and deposed head of Project Veritas, is yet another failed theater kid. Founded in 2010, Project Veritas specializes in creating deceptively edited entrapment videos that showed progressives allegedly saying or doing compromising things… Of course, Project Veritas itself can be seen as a form of theater—albeit ineptly produced theater with crude and melodramatic plots…
One could extend almost indefinitely the list of right-wing provocateurs who had theater-kid backgrounds to include figures like Steven Crowder and Mark Steyn (who recorded a truly dreadful album titled Feline Groovy where he croons, in a faux-Sinatra fashion, cat-themed songs against a background of pastiche soft jazz). Even Gore Vidal or Mary McCarthy would struggle to find the vocabulary to describe how terrible the results are…
Ironically, politics and theater are merging at the exact same time that actual theater—whether musical or not—is in financial crisis thanks to the lingering impact of Covid. The critic Isaac Butler warns, “The American theater is on the verge of collapse.” Butler’s solution is a massive bailout of theater along the lines of the Federal Theater Project of the New Deal era. The migration of failed theater kids into right-wing politics suggests an added side benefit to this proposal. Surely we want future Steve Bannons and James O’Keefes to be working on productions of West Side Story in Peoria rather than shaping national politics.
Since politics has fused with entertainment, we shouldn’t be surprised when would-be or failed entertainers thrive as political leaders and pundits. Frank Sinatra once sang of New York, “If I can make it there / I‘ll make it anywhere.” A modern update might be: If you can’t make it on Broadway, there’s always Washington.
Fifty years ago when I realized I wasn’t an actor, I got off the stage and hit the typewriter. But I still knew the difference between theatre and real life. These clowns don’t know the difference.
